I tend to find many ways to "usefully" avoid working on my dissertation. But one thing I seem to do a lot is to think about ways I can get computers to do my work for me. Total success still eludes me but I thought I would start sharing what I have learned along the way. Topics in this blog should especially appeal to social science researchers but may appeal to geeks of other persuasions as well. UPDATED WEEKLY (sort of).

Cerience Repligo has been a popular choice for me ever since I purchased a pocket pc. This is its primary purpose: to convert documents into a format that is easier to read on your mobile device. However, I find the accompanying desktop software is also useful.

“RepliGo documents keep the original appearance, fonts, graphics, and formatting intact and provide a reflowed text view for easy reading on small screen devices.”

In my own experience this works with most documents but not all. I have found that a small percentage of PDF documents, for instance, would either not convert into repligo or convert with errors.

Highlight and Annotation: Repligo is great for this. It is easy to pick the color of your highlights. However, there is no way to print the highlights and notes you add to the document.

Ease of use: I find it very easy to use. The interface is simple.

Document Search: You can search within documents. Also, with some tweaking some desktop search engines (such as Copernic Desktop Search) seem to be able to include the text of repligo documents in their searches. But it can be imperfect.

Additional Features: You can add bookmarks to the document and hyperlinks are often preserved.

Mobipocket Reader is primarily marketed as an “eBook” reader, but it has a number of features that may make it useful for reading academic documents as well.

Cost: The basic Mobipocket Reader is free. There are other products that allow you to create eBooks and cost more. I review only the free product here.

File Formats: According to their support forum, the free Desktop Reader can convert Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Visio files as well as PDF, html, and text. The conversion results in documents with a .prc extension.

The conversion results in text-only documents. Original page formatting and numbering is lost in the conversion as the text is converted into one long stream (although paragraph breaks are often kept clean). In my experience, documents with large numbers of images (charts, graphs, pictures, etc.) are difficult to convert. Some images are preserved.

Highlight and Annotation: Wonderful options for highlighting and annotating. And I really like the annotations pane that keeps track of bookmarks, notes, highlights

Ease of Use: I find the software is relatively easy to use for document reading purposes.

Document Search: You can search within documents. I am not sure whether you can integrate mobipocket documents into desktop search engines, but I would guess that you could with similar functionality to what you see with repligo.

Additional Features: As mentioned earlier, Mobipocket is an “eBook” reader. There are a wide range of novels and non-fiction books available for purchase through their website.

Mobipocket also includes a news reader program that can download content for a range of news-oriented and blog-oriented websites for reading on your desktop pc or pda.

Summary:

Cerience Repligo and Mobipocket are two of the top choices for the PDA market, but both also can be useful for reading documents on a desktop pc. I have both on my computers, but I tend to use Repligo more for two reasons: (1) it better preserves images, charts, graphs, tables; (2) it preserves the original page formatting. However, if all you need to do is read text the mobipocket interface is excellent and may be the better option.